This is a space for criticism, critique and meta-commentary.
Este es un espacio personal para la crítica y el meta-comentario.
“The dialectical critic of culture must both participate in culture and not participate. Only then does he/she do justice to his/her object and to him/herself”.
Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’

Páginas

1/26/2010

The following text below was written in the fall of 2008 as occasion of the exhibition There is no road: (the road is made by walking) curated by Steven Bode, director of Film & Video Umbrella, London, at LABoral in Gijón (Spain). The text was commissioned by this art center in order to contextualize the exhibition and served as parallel or pedagogical material to be distributed and used alongside the exhibition. Although the text doesn’t refer properly to the exhibition there was neither an attempt to explain it nor to coincide with the exhibition thesis. Rather it was a personal account about certain ideas related with the representation of mountains in literature, cinema and art.

It brings somehow previous ideas I had when researching and talking about the work of the artist Ibon Aranberri, although it is neither a text based in his work. I recall here previous essays on him: Footprints (Afterall magazine, London, 2006) and Cognitive Maps (UOVO, Torino, 2007) as prior advances or pre-visions to his further participation in Documenta XII in Kassel with the work Exercises on the North Side (2007-ongoing). It must be said that he was also participating in the exhibition mentioned here, There is no road, with a development of project which is still ongoing.

The essay features some subjects I’m attracted to as Werner Herzog’s films, Susan Sontag’s writings and also the alpinist Reinhold Messner. It also features notes on Romanticism and German expressionist cinema (mainly Arnold Fanck) together with representations of Nazism (as Leni Riefenstahl).

The text is now published for the first time to a general reader and it might contribute to re-think about the politics of snow and ice.

Into Thin Air: a brief overview about the representation of mountains

Peio Aguirre

The passion to climb mountains, cut through valleys and cross deserts has accompanied all observers of the erosion of nature. The filmmaker Werner Herzog has never tired of shooting big empty spaces, over and over again, throughout his entire life, knowing that what man longs to discover in these immensities is no more than some form of protection from his own fears and anxieties. For Herzog, the mystery lies not so much in looking outwards, towards the solitude of wide open plains, but inwards, inside oneself, to existential intimacy.

This feeling is palpable in films like Fata Morgana (1971), where the mirroring flatness of the desert flickers in the perception of the gaze; La Soufrière (1977), with the imminent explosion of a volcano as the sole protagonist; in The Dark Glow of the Mountains (1984), a documentary on the motivations driving a mountaineer—a plethoric Reinhold Messner—to scale extreme heights; or Grizzly Man (2005) picking apart the obsession to try and understand the untameable wild; right up until the recently released Encounters at the End of the World (2007) on a bunch of world-weary outcasts of civilization in the Antarctica.

All these films speak (or spoke) of the need for balance between the conditions of the exterior medium, of painful nature (like the animal kingdom), with the human, to re-establish a consciousness of the other in one’s own subjectivity based on the great inhospitable or untamed unknown.

One could draw a parallel between these and other films by Herzog which look at voyages and people (Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo) and the way in which some artists seem to approach the wilderness, the spiritual side of mountains. The majority of times, it is the form of production that marks the difference between ways of seeing and observing. Like, for instance, when production adapts to the cycles of nature, changing the relationship with time and place, like in Land Art or, the other way round, in more conventional cinema when on many occasions the opposite happens, in other words, nature is subjected to production, and if there has to be an explosion then this will be created artificially, and if there has to be an avalanche, the same happens.

Yet nothing (not even the mountains escapes the cycle of capital now that extreme and adventure sports become mere urban projections, when the conquest of the planet is a consummated fact, when the earth is used as the source of economic exploitation or when environmentalism is the new trend. Messner’s slogan “Everest by fair means” is only the appendix of the state of the highest peaks. Natural resources have succumbed to economic development by governments and capital. Scaling Everest possesses a monetary value. Not even mountaineering, increasingly more militarised, is free. It is a general rule that the greater the commercialisation of the “exceptional”, whether distant unexplored territory or the purity of an aesthetic experience, the less special it becomes. Nonetheless, an ethics of nature emerges in some art practices, where walking, sailing, exploring and crossing the frontiers dividing us from our surroundings is a whole new field of experience.

In his memoirs Messner recalled that when he was young and used to climb the Tirol mountains, the farmers and shepherds who inhabited these heights looked on him as a madman. Why would anybody want to climb such peaks? What was the purpose? Why would he put his life at risk for something so unproductive? When did man start to climb mountains? Was it at the service of his own personal freedom, or for his country, ideology or religion? The origins of modern mountain climbing have been described as a reflection of the urban, universal, bourgeois character. The landscape in itself, as an unquestionable reality, as drama, always represented the construction of an exterior, civic gaze, the viewpoint projected by a social and ideological construct. The roots of the heroic pioneers of mountain climbing (from Edmund Hillary to Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, Duke of the Abruzzi) only go to prove that even mountains are the site of class issues, where the failure of a bourgeois revolution, and the birth instead of industrial capitalism, remind us that mountain climbing was not, is not, by any means an escape from the unsupportable conditions of western industrial and post-industrial society but an extension of the drive to conquer.

First Romanticism, and later the emancipatory discourse of Modernism, outlined a view of the earth as a natural reserve at the service of man’s desire. Furthermore, it is at great heights where mankind has deposited his most fantasising hopes and dreams, there where the frontier between reason and intellect, intuition and logic expand the consciousness of the limit. When we ascend mountains, they remain unaltered, but the person who comes down afterwards is another person. The characteristic asceticism of mountaineering is, in this regard, a genuinely modern feature and the source of the feeling that the aesthetic can only be fully realised and incarnated there where there is something more than the merely aesthetic. It is no coincidence that the archetype of the perfect modernist included a devotion for asceticism and purism, the follower of new doctrines of the body, like vegetarianism, and above all else, a love for mountains.

But, do myths not come from nature? Myth and nature play a role in a romantic tradition not altogether destabilised by the spirit of the Enlightenment, and although modern secularisation would put the balance of this couple at risk, Modernism has not stopped creating its own infinite myths. The aspiration to totality would be one of these myths; the plenitude of man with nature. The secularisation of the mountain, in alpine terms, would equate to a materialist position or perspective; one would rise to the peaks to discover that up there, is nothing there. That there is no secret. Nevertheless, what they do discover is the void of existence or the capacity of the consciousness to launch one and a thousand questions without answers.

It is equally true that geographic places like valleys and mountains are enclaves apt for the birth (and later development) of ideologies of a romantic-nationalist bent. In the monumentality of the mountain the perception of nature under the optic of idealism takes on absolutist tinges, conforming an idea of nature cut across by cultural gazes.

It is also a feature of mountaineering cinema and literature, as narrative genres in their own right, that great mountaineers are also great narrators or storytellers (Edmund Hillary and Doug Scott).

Now we have this exhibition, full of audiovisual works on walking, on the road, on mountain peaks, reinforcing the old idea that since the beginning of the 20th century the medium that best expresses the mountain is film. Arnold Fanck’s filmography was a hymn to mountains, and also to national socialism; The Holy Mountain (1926) and the thriller Avalanche (Stürme über dem Mont-Blanc) (1930) both starring the young actress Leni Riefenstahl, before her metamorphosis as the talented director of Triumph of the Will (1934) and Olympia (1936), are magnificent examples. Fanck’s films combine the imaginary of German expressionist film with romantic exaltation (think Caspar David Friedrich), representing nature as the sublimation of the cult to individuality and the characteristic mood of certain values of national socialism.

The interesting thing about Fanck’s films for Riefenstahl (“pop-Wagnerian vehicles” as Susan Sontag put it) is not the moral mysticism of the tragedy, but the unprotected approach to nature, without any kind of physical fear of the technical challenge of filming in extreme atmospheric and climatologic conditions.

Fanck’s talent is radically forthright and Leni Riefenstahl is its poet and catalyst. As Sontag wrote in her essay Fascinating Fascism, “Mountain climbing in Fanck's films was a visually irresistible metaphor for unlimited aspiration toward the high mystic goal, both beautiful and terrifying, which was later to become concrete in Führer-worship”. (In Under the Sign of Saturn, 1980).

In this case, mountain and totalitarianism go hand in hand, with an equal obsession in Nazi Germany for industrial design and for design at the service of a specialized mountain division.

Herzog and Fanck, Fanck and Herzog, two Germans, two opposing ways of making film that are now necessary to rediscover in the light of the re-actualization of the mountain as raw material for art.